With all that’s going on, what are our operational plans? We care about our clients. There’s four things I want to talk about. Three very briefly. We know what’s going on with markets we’ve prepared for them. It’s going to hurt. This, too, will pass. There will be fantastic buying opportunities, but not quite yet. COVID-19 – you all watch the news. You all can read. You all probably have an idea that this isn’t going to be fun. Now, we do know that the percentages and the statistics that we actually were presenting as much as a month ago, it turns out they seem to be pretty much spot on. And so for most people, this will be unpleasant at worst. But there will be tragedies, and that’s something we need to try to protect our loved ones from as well as yours.

And of course the Energy industry is getting hammered. Anyone in Houston is fully aware of that. Same is true in Denver. Same is true for the Airline industry. Those clients, there’s a certain amount of tension there. It’s very easy to let our emotions get the best of us, and I’m not being a Pollyanna – I’m not trying to downplay – but these are all manageable events and we must do the best we can to manage. What we’re doing internally – we have operations for remote operation. We know our office will probably forcibly close sometime next week. It doesn’t matter. We have the equipment and we have stress tested it, and every single employee can be as effective working from their home office as if they were working in this central location. So we’re ready. How will that affect the clients? The only way it’ll affect the clients is we’ll be doing all meetings by Zoom. From this point on until further notice, every scheduled meeting will be a Zoom meeting. Honestly, a lot of you are going to find out after doing it that it’s more efficient. A little less of chitchat, little less of my pontification. Definitely more efficient. Number one importance to us is the care of our team and our clients. So stay well.

Thank you,

Paul J. Carroll, CFP^®